French elections confirm mass discontent with SP policies

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Unemployed demonstrate against Mitterrand government.: "We want jobs!" to a four-year-old blockade, had been deprived of any People's Front. It was obliged to win its right to "Before the beginning of the conflict, Khodzhaly ties.

Azerbaijani armed forces to shoot down a plane evac- was a very small town. It was built fundamentally uating wounded Armenians from Stepanakert, the after the start of the dispute with some of the 400 falling into the rut of traditional anti-Armenian feelcapital of Nagorno-Karabakh, illustrates the character million rubles that the USSR Supreme Soviet appro- ing. It even tried to outbid the Stalinists, becoming priated for Nagorno-Karabakh, recognizing that involved in supporting a blockade of the Armenians The Azerbaijani forces have been trying to break Azerbaijan had created insufficient funds for develop- and was implicated in anti-Armenian pogroms. the resistance of the Armenian majority in the ing the area."

Bonner went on to accuse the Russian vice-presi- Great Russian domination developed in January shelling. Thus, the decisive factor has become the dent and neo-Stalinist chauvinist leader, Aleksandr 1990, Gorbachev was able to crush the movement Rutskol, of mounting a provocation against Arme- with relative impunity. Subsequently, the Azeri front Land fighting has centered on clearing the airport nia. The Russian chief had raised a hue and cry about itself fragmented and became relatively marginalized for Stepanakert in order to allow Armenian planes to an alleged attack by Armenian militiamen on Soviet It has been notable throughout the conflict over Azeris, not the Armenians. If the Azeris have anyNagorno-Karabakh that neo-Stalinist forces have been thing to fear from the Armenians, it is that they will The deaths of Azeri civilians in Khodzhaly on Feb closely linked to Azeri chauvinists. Yegor Lichachev, serve as the agents of the Russians in the Caucasus. 26 were related to an operation by Karabakh Armeni- Gorbachev's erstwhile rival, touched off a new wave The right wing of the Karabakh movement, intellecan forces aimed at breaking the Azerbaijani blockade. of Armenian protests, for example, by promising the tuals such as Silva Kapoutikian and Zori Balayan, did In a news conference in Paris on March 16, Elena Azerbaijani Communist Party leadership that try to appeal to the tradition of the old Christian Bonner, widow of Andrei Sakharov and a Soviet dis- Nagorno-Karabakh's subordination to Azerbaijan was alliance. sident with Armenian connections, made the a settled question. Before the failure of the August following argument: "The world press is repeating coup, the Soviet army was forcibly deporting Arme- ment has rejected this approach. Thus, they the lie that when they took the village of Khodzhaly, nian populations near the area of conflict.

In Armenia and among the Armenians in despite the suffering it inflicted on Armenians, and Karabakh, the fight for national rights was launched sought to negotiate a settlement with it. "Already a week before this, the Armenians had from below and opposed by the Stalinist leaders. In made it clear that they were going to wage a fight for Azerbaijan, the campaign against the Armenian the arms of their "Russian protectors" than the poliKhodzhaly, the only airport on the territory of demands for Karabakh was supported by the Commu- cies followed by the Azeri government and Popular Karabakh. Without this airport, Karabakh, subjected nist Party leadership.

16 SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 1992 PARIS—On March 22, French voters were called to the polls in what was widely considered to be a dress rehearsal for the legislative elections due to be held in March 1993. Voters were called on to elect assemblies for France's 22 regions, as well as for half of the seats in the departmental (county) councils.

The result of the elections created a minor earthquake. The ruling Socialist Party, which has been in office for most of the last decade, received an unprecedented rebuff. Only 18.3 percent of the electorate voted for the party of President François Mitterrand and Prime Minister Edith Cresson.

If there was no doubt about who was the big loser in these elections, it was not as easy to identify who won. Certainly not the traditional right, which ran a common slate under the name "Union of the French People" (UPF). It got 33 percent of the votes, with another 4 percent going to independent allies. Nor were the neofascists of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front (NF) the big winners. The 13.9 percent they got was well short of their expectations and far from being the breakthrough hoped for and announced.

Nevertheless, the NF has stabilized its electoral influence and is now represented in all 22 regional councils. Moreover, in some areas, it got well over 20 percent and even 25 percent. In the city of Nice, Le Pen himself came on top of the poll with 30 percent.

As for the Communist Party, which had hoped to attract disillusioned SP voters, it had only a very limited success. With eight percent of the vote, it barely managed to stem its long-term electoral decline.

Who were the "winners"?

The big "winners" were the two ecology parties—the Greens led by Antoine Waechter, and Generation Ecology, led by Brice Lalonde, minister of the environment in the Cresson goverment. Between them, they garnered 15 percent of the votes.

The abstention rate was much lower than almost all observers had predicted, just under 30 percent. That compares with 51 percent in the 1989 elections for the European parliament and 34 percent in the 1988 legislative elections.

The near success on March 27 of an attempt by of the recent fighting in the disputed enclave.

enclave through a blockade and long-distance airlink with Armenia.

land. Low-flying helicopters are very vulnerable to groundfire from the Azerbaijani forces.

the Armenians killed thousands of people, that they shot down women and children. That is not true.

This fact is important. Up till now, working-class rejection of the right-wing policies of the SP has mainly been expressed through abstention. This time many electors chose to go to the polls and find another way to protest. More than a million of them (out of 25 million who voted) expressed their rejection of all the parties by spoiling their ballot papers or voting blank.

Moreover, if the ecologists were the main beneficiaries of the valid votes, all sorts of other slates that could be perceived as independent of both the goverment and the right-wing opposition registered good scores. These ranged from the faintly eccentric and apolitical "Hunting, Fishing, Nature and Tradition" slates, which got enough votes to elect regional councilors in 13 regions out of 22, to the all-women slate, which got a regional councilor in Alsace.

Also worth noting is the fact that almost everywhere that dissident members of the SP or CP ran slates, they scored well—in several cases surpassing the official slates and getting elected.

Not all these slates were to the left of the official parties. In the case of the SP, however, this was the case to some extent. The SP dissidents were among those who opposed the Gulf War, but without taking sort of normal link with the outside world. soldiers in the town of Artik.

Alaln Nogues/Sygma ET/SURTRUD an anti-imperialist position and without breaking from reformism and general support for the government.

Most of the dissident CP slates, on the other hand, were, if anything, to the right of the party leadership. They were led by cadres nostalgic for the time when the CP was allied with the SP in the class-collaborationist "Union of the Left." The most successful among them was led by Marcel Rigout, who from 1981 to 1984 was in the cabinet of SP Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy.

Also to be noted is the special case of Corsica, where nationalist and autonomist forces registered important gains.

The main lesson to be drawn from these elections is that in the absence of a credible left alternative to the SP, many voters refused to vote for the right and chose mainly the ecologists, without positively endorsing the rather confused policies of Lalonde and Waechter. But in so doing they voted for parties that have nothing in common with the workers' movement, and could tomorrow be part of antiworkingclass governments, of the right or of the "left."

Indeed, although Brice Lalonde managed to "autonomize" himself from the SP during the campaign, it should not be forgotten that he is a minister in a government that is responsible for attacks on workers, women, youth and immigrants.

Role of revolutionary left The only revolutionaries to run a national campaign in these elections were the Trotskyists of the organization Lutte Ouvrière (LO), who ran slates in 30 departments out of 90. The LCR (French section of the Fourth International) ran only a few candidates, as did the followers of Pierre Lambert, now dissolved in a "Workers Party."

The LO slates got around 300,000 votes (from one to three percent in most departments), and progressed in relation to the elections in 1986 and 1989.

The LCR called for a vote for LO. Its youth organization, the JCR, ran an active campaign, through meetings and leaflets and in its newspaper, L'Egalité in favor of a vote for LO, while expressing criticisms of their platform.

In France today, many workers and youth are looking for a way to fight against the Cresson government without helping the right. The strikes of last fall (see the December issue of Socialist Action) showed a willingness to fight, but they were undermined by the class-collaborationist and divisive policies of the SP, CP and trade-union leaderships.

When there is a broad-based mobilization against government policies around clear demands, the response can be massive, as we saw with the big antiracist march last Jan. 25 (see the January issue of Socialist Action).

But what prevents an overall fightback is the role of the reformist leaderships and the weakness and division of the revolutionaries. This is also true on the electoral front. There is no chance that SP leaders will draw the conclusion from these elections that they should change course and start defending the working people who elected them.

On the contrary, Mitterrand is now studying a range of possibilities, all of which involve "broadening" the government to bring in even more representatives of the right than there are already. This might even include forming a government with a non-SP prime minister.

The task that faces revolutionaries from now until 1993 is to reinforce the fight to get rid of this anti-working-class government and force the SP and CP to. form a government that satisfies the workers' demands, without any representatives of the right.

That involves, above all, mobilizations from below, such as the battle for a united demonstration of the workers and antiracist movements on May Day. But it also means starting now to prepare an effective intervention of revolutionary political currents in the 1993 elections.

A national-democratic movement did arise in Azerbaijan similar to those that have arisen among other oppressed peoples of the old USSR, the Azerbaijan organize in a struggle against the Stalinist authoriBut it made the error of taking the easiest road and The result was that when an Azeri uprising against It is the Great Russians who have oppressed the However, the leadership of the Armenian movedenounced the Soviet repression of the Azeri front, There is no better way to force the Armenians into Front. That would be a tragedy for both peoples. •

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